March 2012

03/31/2012

The Denver Post continues to cobver the case of terrorist suspect Jamshid Muhtorov and it is interesting to see the turns it has taken.

Muhtorov has pleaded not guilty to charges of terrorism, yet the prosecutor says Muhtorov has admitted that he supported the Islamic Jihad Union which fights NATO in Afghanistan as well as the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan.

Greg Holloway, the prosecutor assigned to Muhtorov's case, told a federal judge that Muhtorov might have become dissatisfied with his life in the U.S. and dedicated his life to global jihad.

Holloway read from letters submitted by Muhtorov's supporters that said he was an educated man in Uzbekistan who had grown frustrated that the only jobs he was able to get involved manual labor. The truck driver had also worked at a meat-packing plant in Greeley and as a casino janitor in Black Hawk.

The income wasn't enough for him to support his wife and two children on his own. His wife, Nargiza, took a job at the Hyatt to help with the household expenses, the letters say.

“It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah,” he said. “It was France.”

This is the "poor absorption" theory of terrorism, although we're told elsewhere that most of the people who have committed terrorism in the US, if they weren't citizens, came here on student visas -- not refugee visas. Says the Times about Merah:

The issue of France’s failure to fully integrate immigrants and provide them with a sense of belonging and opportunity has been notably absent from the country’s presidential campaign, even as some candidates have intensified their calls to limit immigration and to root out homegrown terrorism.

The prosecutor could be backing down and preparing for a request for a lesser sentence if he finds that Muhtorov's motivation wasn't so much to harm NATO or the US, but was more about venting his spleen or just fighting Karimov. Either way, material support to a foreign terrorist organization is still material support and that may be all that gets looked at.

Or, as a lawyer I know suggested, the prosecutor could be going in just the opposite direction, demonstrating with this very understandable cliche now -- poor adaption syndrome leading to terrorism, just like in Toulouse -- that the suspect is guilty. What at first sounds like it might lead to an exoneration might in fact build the case.

From the beginning, Sarah Kendzior and others at Registan banged the drum about anti-Muslim hatred forming a punitive climate for this suspect, and the case leading to less willingness by the US to take in refugees. I think she and others are over-stating the hate posts around this story -- I see one anti-refugee blog that has mentioned the case; a few comments from disgruntled readers of the Post, and of course the ever-ready Atlas Shrugs which always takes a shrill anti-Islamic stance. But for these sources, the case fit into a pre-existing narrative and they flog it consistent with their past views. I don't think we can really say there is now some new hysterical campaign of hatred -- most people are ignoring this case or have never heard of it. Nor is it this case alone that has contributed to a tightening of screening of refugees by the US.

Of course, it's always of concern if Muslim refugees begin to be seen as a suspicious population, and it would be awful of Uzbeks began to be refused refugee status, and terrible if human rights groups began to be suspected as mere covers for terrorism.

Who would be to blame for that in the first instance? Jamshid Muhtorov himself, for hanging out in human rights groups, after he developed beefs against the Karimov government first for interfering with his beverage business and liquor business then arresting his sister for murder in what he believed to be a trumped-up case; then for taking land from farmers which he felt was grounds to band together with others to overthrow the regime; then reportedly sending agents to entrap him and later beat him for distributing human rights reports. He then fled to Kyrgyzstan, where ultimately both an emigre and a Kyrgyz migration official thought he was a police informer and an opportunist and then after getting refugee status in the US and working here for five or six years, he turns up as a terrorist suspect.

I'm keen to make the sharp distinction between peaceful and lawful human rights work and peaceful and lawful resistance to the regime, and extremism and terrorism. Muhtorov isn't. Neither are the Registanis. Neither is Muhtorov's lawyer, understandably -- he will play up his role as a victim and as a human rights activist to try to get the halo effect.

Muhtorov himself is recorded by the FBI as talking openly about support of the Islamic Jihad Union, and warning his supporter (also later arrested) to stop openly talking about this, because the FBI might be listening -- even swearing at them (and of course they were listening, earning his label as the "bumbling terrorist" from the Christian Science Monitor).

They are sensitive to this in Colorado because another case occurred there besides Muhtorov -- from a refugee Afghanistan (Najibullah Zazi) found guilty of planning a terrorist attack. And there is also the Uzbek emigre who planned to assassinate Obama. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), called for congressional hearings on the resettlement process after the February 2011 arrests of two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky accused of conspiring to send weapons to al-Qaeda, says the Denver Post. The US takes in more refugees than any other country in the world -- but though we had 80,000 slots available for resettlement, only 56,000 were used last year, says the Post.

Long before Muhtorov, Registan, or my blog, the process had slowed because of increased security checks.

"Most recently, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have attempted to recruit and radicalize people to terrorism here in the United States, as we have seen in several plots and attacks, including the deadly attack two years ago on our service members at Fort Hood," said President Barack Obama in August. "As a government, we are working to prevent all types of extremism that leads to violence, regardless of who inspires it."

Based on his story as we have heard it from different sources, Muhtorov had every right to receive refugee status in this country. You don't have to be a good human rights activist or disprove that you are an opportunist despite what others think -- you just have to show a well-founded fear of persecution. He indeed had one. The overwhelming majority of refugees never turn to extremist or violence -- he did. Why blame the condition of the refugee? The same "progressive" theory that tries to find a justifying spring of violence in the poor life of refugees also inevitably tars the entire group with the same brush, just as much as the conservative anti-immigration theory.

So what's next? Eventually the case will come to trial and we will hear the state's evidence and learn whether the secret witness is revealed or the testimony appears.“It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah,” he said. “It was France.”

This is the "poor absorption" theory of terrorism, although we're told elsewhere that most of the people who have committed terrorism in the US, if they weren't citizens, came here on student visas -- not refugee visas. Says the Times about Merah:

The issue of France’s failure to fully integrate immigrants and provide them with a sense of belonging and opportunity has been notably absent from the country’s presidential campaign, even as some candidates have intensified their calls to limit immigration and to root out homegrown terrorism.

I'll respond to that in another post, but the operative point is that Holloway, an award-winning US assistant attorney who also prosecuted Najibullah Zazi, felt that frustration with menial labour could have made Muhtorov become more extreme.

The prosecutor could be backing down and preparing for a request for a lesser sentence if he finds that Muhtorov's motivation wasn't so much to harm NATO or the US, but was more about venting his spleen or just fighting Karimov. Either way, material support to a foreign terrorist organization is still material support and that may be all that gets looked at.

Or, as a lawyer I know suggested, the prosecutor could be going in just the opposite direction, demonstrating with this very understandable cliche now -- poor adaption syndrome leading to terrorism, just like in Toulouse -- that the suspect is guilt. What at first sounds like it might lead to an exoneration might in fact build the case.

From the beginning, Sarah Kendzior and others at Registan banged the drum about anti-Muslim hatred forming a punitive climate for this suspect, and the case leading to less willingness by the US to take in refugees. I think she and others are over-stating the hate posts around this story -- I see one anti-refugee blog that has mentioned the case; a few comments from disgruntled readers of the Post, and of course the ever-ready Atlas Shrugs which always takes a shrill anti-Islamic stance. But for these sources, the case fit into a pre-existing narrative and they flog it consistent with their past views. I don't think we can really say there is now some new hysterical campaign of hatred -- most people are ignoring this case or have never heard of it.

Of course, it's always of concern if Muslim refugees begin to be seen as a suspicious population, and it would be awful of Uzbeks began to be refused refugee status, and terrible if human rights groups began to be suspected as mere covers for terrorism.

Who would be to blame for that in the first instance? Jamshid Muhtorov himself, for hanging out in human rights groups, after he developed beefs against the Karimov government first for interfering with his beverage business and liquor business then arresting his sister for murder in what he believed to be a trumped-up case; then for taking land from farmers which he felt was grounds to band together with others to overthrow the regime; then reportedly sending agents to entrap him and later beat him for distributing human rights reports. He then fled to Kyrgyzstan, where ultimately both an emigre and a Kyrgyz migration official thought he was a police informer and an opportunist and then after getting refugee status in the US and working here for five or six years, he turns up as a terrorist suspect.

I'm keen to make the sharp distinction between peaceful and lawful human rights work and peaceful and lawful resistance to the regime, and extremism and terrorism. Muhtorov isn't. Neither are the Registanis. Neither is Muhtorov's lawyer, understandably -- he will play up his role as a victim and as a human rights activist to try to get the halo effect.

Muhtorov himself is recorded by the FBI as talking openly about support of the Islamic Jihad Union, and warning his supporter (also later arrested) to stop openly talking about this, because the FBI might be listening -- even swearing at them (and of course they were listening, earning his label as the "bumbling terrorist" from the Christian Science Monitor).

The Post's Felisa Cardona addresses the issue of refugees and poor absorption extensively in her piece March 2.

They are sensitive to this in Colorado because another case occurred there besides Muhtorov -- from a refugee Afghanistan (Najibullah Zaz) found guilty of planning a terrorist attack. And there is also the Uzbek emigre who planned to assassinate Obama. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), called for congressional hearings on the resettlement process after the February 2011 arrests of two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky accused of conspiring to send weapons to al-Qaeda, says the Denver Post. The US takes in more refugees than any other country in the world -- but though we had 80,000 slots available for resettlement, only 56,000 were used last year, says the Post.

Long before Muhtorov, Registan, or my blog, the process had slowed because of increased security checks.

None other than Obama himself said:

"Most recently, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have attempted to recruit and radicalize people to terrorism here in the United States, as we have seen in several plots and attacks, including the deadly attack two years ago on our service members at Fort Hood," said President Barack Obama in August. "As a government, we are working to prevent all types of extremism that leads to violence, regardless of who inspires it."

And the fact is, NATO troops continue to be attacked by Uzbek fighters in Afghanistan; some Uzbek militants were wounded by NATO as recently as this week in a drone attack.

Based on his story as we have heard it from different sources, Muhtorov had every right to receive refugee status in this country. You don't have to be a good human rights activist or disprove that you are an opportunist despite what others think -- you just have to show a well-founded fear of persecution. He indeed had one. The overwhelming majority of refugees never turn to extremist or violence -- he did. Why blame the condition of the refugee? The same "progressive" theory that tries to find a justifying spring of violence in the poor life of refugees also inevitably tars the entire group with the same brush, just as much as the conservative anti-immigration theory.

So what's next? Eventually the case will come to trial and we will hear the state's evidence and learn whether the secret witness is revealed or the testimony appears.

As noted, perhaps Muhtorov was set up by the former head of Jizzakh's counter-terrorism department back in Uzbekistan -- perhaps he's the source (he gained refugee status as well and is reportedly driving a cab in New York). Perhaps both of them are in collusion with the SNB, the intelligence service of Uzbekistan, to create the illusion of a terrorism case to justify the regime's crackdown. That theory, a conspiratorial one, seems far-fetched only because it would require one or both of the refugees going to jail and possibly never getting extradited to Uzbekistan, because in fact lawyers could object to it on the grounds of fear of torture and further persecution.

03/29/2012

I have to laugh when Nathan Hamm of Registan copiesmy blog. How do I know he even reads it? Because he sometimes kicks up a fuss on Twitter, and because the person who comes here nearly every day from "hidemyass.com" has to be him (most people wouldn't bother with that sillyness). He was also hear using software to scoop up all the pages, imaging they would be changed or something.

Oh, sure, everybody is writing about the dancing dictator, the story first covered by Radio Ozodlik. And you wouldn't have to be copying me to say that Karimov is interested in protecting his family's wealth, that's a no-brainer.

But to dig into an uzmetronom.com post that was days ago and already buried on that site and reference that AND to mention Sobirov, who is never in the news -- as I did -- that's just too much of a coincidence.

As for uzmetronom.com, which isn't reliable, way in the bottom of a story already gone from the first page and even the "previous" pages, there's Ezhkov's theory that the next ruling party head will be the next head of state, so watch that space (i.e. in the December 2014 elections).

But Hamm really needs to learn Russian better, it is the lingua franca for this region. He mistranslates uzmetronom.com as follows:

that the election was shifted so that it would take place when large numbers of seasonal agricultural workers were out of the country and unable to vote.

But what Ezhkov wrote (in a part I skipped because it was just speculative snark) was about workers inside the country:

Experts analyzing the Constitutional Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan, "On the Next Elections to Representative Bodies of State Authority and the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan" do not understand why the next elections of the president (but not all subsequent elections -- that's fundamentally important) coincide with the peak of spring field work, at which usually about 60 percent of the population of the republic are occupied.

The confusion emerged because previously the moving of the elections to the head of state from January to December was explained in fact because in December, the agricultural population has finished its season and has free tome, which is necessary for an objective evaluation of the campaign platform of every candidate for president.

The Uzbek government isn't terribly worried about the vote of the migrant workers who in principle could vote in Uzbek Embassies abroad -- they manipulate the vote to be the percentage they need, so it's not so important.

03/28/2012

Should you dance with the dictator -- literally? That was the question some people had in mind when they saw the video clip discovered by Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, showing our own American envoy to Tashkent, Ambassador George Krol, dancing in the stadium audience at the official Novrouz celebration.

The ambassador is highly experienced and smart, speaks Russian and Polish and has served extensively in the former Soviet Union so he "gets it" about these countries. So most likely he danced merely because it was an official festival to open spring and that's what you do to express good will -- and simply have a good time.

Even so, the question I'd ask is this: when you dance at these official mass events that have people rehearsing for hours and performing before the tyrant like this, is it gushing? Is it the sort of gushing you shouldn't really do even if you really badly need Uzbekistan as a transit route for NATO troops and equipment because the route through Pakistan is blocked?

As I've said before, the exigency of our situation is obvious, and it's not as if you say "don't deal with this tyrant because he tortures thousands of people in prison who don't belong there" or "don't get our troops and equipment out of Afghanistan or supplies to them while they remain". It's not either or, but the latter taking up the priority. Even so, quiet diplomacy on human rights is used, and there is a certain decorum -- "not gushing" that you can exhibit so as not provide easy fodder to critical NGOs.

See, this is where I think you could safely draw the line -- go to the official event -- you have to, when they invite the entire diplomatic corps and the president is there -- but just stand tactfully, without excessive kicking up of your heels.

The real story for Uzbeks was, of course, that President Islam Karimov is shown dancing -- stiffly, and like your old uncle at your wedding when you're blasting the rock music -- but still, dancing and twisting his hands in the Central Asian style.

What's a bigger story, though, for the attentive eye is that Karimov looks awful. Usually he's made up for the cameras and close-ups in official press releases and TV shows, but this is outdoors, in the glaring spring sun, and he looks pale, weak, and sick. You wonder how long he will last!

And if you read the usually pro-Karimov uzmetronom.com, the answer is -- perhaps not even another three years in power!

As was widely reported the next day after this Novrouz celebration held March 22, the Uzbek parliament ruled to extend Karimov's term by several months, i.e. the parliamentary elections are moved to December 2014, then the presidential elections are moved to 90 days after them, i.e. March 2014 or thereabouts, ostensibly to give a chance for these democratic parties in the parliament *cough* a chance to find their candidate for the head of state.

Karimov has been president since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and head of state since 1989.

There was some effort to portray a "move to democracy" when Karimov shortened the term of president for the next president from 7 to 5 years and changed some things about how the head of state is elected. And it seems as if the parliament was working on making Uzbekistan the first parliamentary state in the CIS, says uzmetronom.com. The pattern had been to replace the general secretary of the Communist era with strong presidents.

But here's a reason why some people may be dancing: Karimov may not run again (and that's been rumoured many times before, and he is supposedly picking his successor.)

Sergei Ezhkov, the editor of saidscandalous uzmetronom.com -- which often serves as a leaking device for the Interior Ministry or intelligence services -- has an editorial March 25 declaring that the Karimov era's end is coming in 2015 -- and you can tell it's a serious one because he is shown with a cigarette in a rueful pose.

Writes Ezhkov:

Now as to the most likely prospects for the development of the situation. Let us recall that according to this law, elections in the Oliy Majlis will take place in December 2014. That means, analysts believe, that Uzbekistan intends to demonstrate the active participation of political parties in the presidential election campaign. The goal is clear and obvious -- prove to the international community that the country is taking broad steps toward the high road of democracy. If these suppositions are correct, then in 2012-2013, we should expect changes in the leadership of one of the political parties.

Most likely, a new leader will appear in the Liberal Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (UzLiDeP) [the ruling party with Karimov as its head]. In principle, our experts have named the proposed leader, however we don't want to personify their conclusions. Let us say only that whoever leads the party on the ascent to the parliamentary elections, in the opinion of experts, should be regarded as the next president of Uzbekistan. That will definitely not be Islam Karimov, and most likely not in the spring of 2015, but in December of that year. The law passed by the Senate the other day is no barrier. The parliament is tame, and it can find the grounds for its need to change the constitution once again.

I hope everyone has by now thrown out the idea that Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the president, is being groomed as a presidential successor -- that was always stupid, and the fact that she lost power with the disintegration of Zeromax, which was seized and put into bankruptcy, is proof enough of that.

Carnegie Central Asian expert Alexander Malashenko has speculated about the succession scene without naming anyone, and like Ezhkov, he talks in terms of Uzbekistan wanting to become more democratic to somehow impress the West. That doesn't track for me -- while the "Inspector General" phenomenon and the foreigner in that role is a meme for the post-Soviet space, I don't think they really look over their shoulders that much to see what the West wants of them. I think they simply want to play the different great powers off against each other and are preoccupied with their own immediate pursuit of Maslov's hierarchy of needs.

Shivkat Mirziyoyev, the prime minister, is sometimes rumoured to be a potential successor, and always described as being about to be overthrown, or losing power, or kicking out other people who didn't remain loyal, or losing his people because his enemies overcame him or -- whatever. Speculation.

The Senate chair Ilgizar Sobirov, said to be formerly in intelligence, is one figure said to be considered as a successor, and certainly he would now have ample "administrative resources" to use the parliament to take over the party and then the presidency.

Of course the dancing dictator's immediate preoccupation is how to secure a safe passage for his own family's wealth and to keep immunity from prosecution. So whomever he annoints will have to display willingness to do this.

Meanwhile, my bet is that Karimov is not going to last. He does not look good. Meanwhile, the American ambassador is capering (perhaps he knows something we don't!), and the camera didn't even pan on the Russian or Chinese diplomats.

03/27/2012

The Denver Post found itself in recent months under a barrage of assault from Registan for its coverage of the case of terrorist suspect Jamshid Muhtorov -- and Joshua Foust also falsely assaulted me as a "liar, lunatic, and fabulist" (!) which I refuted here in implying that the prosecutor quoted my blog (!) in this case.

And inevitably, such pressure does take a toll, even though the journalists are trying to do a good job and have been doing a good job with this complicated story, despite the snark from Registan, underscored by that perceived Beltway "sophistication" and superiority over flyover states and their courthouses.

In today's piece about a formality in which Muhtorov pled not-guilty, Felisa Carona, the Post writer who has been covering the story, takes up less of the description of the prosecutor's findings from the FBI investigation, and his theory of the case, and focuses more on the defense's narrative. That's fine, if she doesn't just then settle into that narrative for the rest of her coverage of the case. Hopefully, there will be the totality of all the events covered and all the pieces to look at as a whole.

But already I see signs of some slippage of objectivity -- I'm a big believer in the "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen contemptuously calls it, which I describe as merely "compiling all the perspectives in the story" in letting the reader judge for himself.

The first point is in the question of Muhtorov as a "human rights activist". Says Cardona:

Muhtorov has a documented record as a human rights activist in the country. He fled Uzbekistan and so did members of his family because they claimed they were oppressed by the government. His sister remains jailed there on an alleged false murder charge, according to Human Rights Watch and government documents.

Well, technically this is true, but he's a former human rights activist, because while once in Ezgulik, a prominent registered human rights organization in Uzbekistan (the name means "Charity"), he was fired for not turning in financial reports and wishing to join another, more radical political group of farmers who wanted to overthrow the regime. Then he fled the country. After he fled Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, he was not known to be in any human rights groups or indeed any emigre or international groups of any kind, until this charge about his relationship to the Islamic Jihad Union.

Making a distinction between human rights groups specifically devoted to monitoring, publicizing and protesting human rights as defined by universal international law; and political groups like those wishing to overthrow the regime, much less terrorist groups -- that's important. Someone might think casually that if Muhtorov was once a human rights activist, then he remains one. But it's important to note that he is not considered one any more by human rights organizations.

I'm not for demanding that someone must be a card-carrying member of a group approved by the state or the international justice jet-set in order to be qualified as a human rights activist -- but I do think it's important to point out that he is really not considered one any more, and that after he left the country, he wasn't known for any activism at all (and that's also not required, especially for emigres struggling with adaptation, but just something to note).

As for this claim in the Post -- "his sister remains jailed there on a false murder charge, according to Human Rights Watch and government documents" -- that's compressed and in fact leading one to a false conclusion. Human Rights Watch didn't make any finding about any validity of any murder charge. They merely reported that he himself believed this to be the case (as far as I know -- I don't see any HRW document or report claiming the case was false).

We also have the account of Tolib Yakubov published by uznews.net that says he believes the story to be false, that the sister was in fact a member of a gang that used her as a lure to taxi drivers who were then robbed and killed, and that while she may have been mistreated or even tortured and didn't get a fair trial, basically, she's guilty.Many impugn Tolib's stories because he is not liked, being very persistent and very dramatic in taking up human rights. But it is an alternative to the narrative that bears consideration as much as anything else -- yes, the Karimov government sets up people falsely all the time, but sometimes a murder accomplice really is a murder accomplice. I've never seen any human rights group in Uzbekistan claim that the sister is innocent of the charges. And that's in a country where several do in fact still take up cases of such false charges and try to press the government.

As for the "government documents," that's just a very compressed form of saying "The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" that again, mention Muhtorov's beatings and his claims about his sister, putting as the source the local human rights groups and/or HRW, but not making their own findings to validate the information (a frequent device one finds in the Country Reports, BTW).

Critics of the charges against him say if Muhtorov was supporting the IJU it wasn't for the purpose of hurting American forces, rather it was to continue fighting a dictator in Uzbekistan.

"Critics" is likely a reference to Joshua Foust and other commenters at Registan, who also migrated over to the anonymous comments section at the Denver Post.

Originally, Foust and others seemed to wave away the charges of the IJU on the grounds that it didn't exist. After some drubbing by another blogger, Foust seemed to concede the IJU existed, but then the narrative began to be implied somehow: that an Uzbek emigre might join the group not because he was actually hoping to bomb NATO soldiers, but merely because he wanted to get back at Karimov (as if violence is ok if it's in a "good cause" -- a premise I reject.)

That was why Foust could take up the bashing of the Denver Post in the first place -- he felt, after the angry commenter (with the anonymous handle of "correct" ) said that the headline was misleading and should be changed, that it was changed -- and that the difference between the prosecutor saying Muhtorov admitted he knew what the IJU was and that it fought NATO, and admitting that he knew what the IJU was and he himself wanted to fight NATO was really crucial.

I believe that it's a distinction without a difference. Regardless of what Muhtorov thought he was doing, if he plans to support a group on the US foreign terrorist organization's list, and he is found at trial to be materially supporting said group, that's support, regardless of whether he thought he was targeting Karimov or NATO. It's also wrong, morally and legally, because it's helping an extremist group to commit violence.

Foust's very firm conviction that this *does* make a difference, which he is hammering the Post about, suggests he may have other sources from somewhere about this case, possibly leaked to him. He was a former defense contractor and has extensive contacts in the government and think-tank world in Washington and "followers" on Twitters. Or perhaps his conviction is merely a function of his usual arrogant skepticism about any terrorism case.

The defense may hope to play up two aspects of this case: a) that Muhtorov had a history as a human rights activist and b) that he only cared about attacking the Karimov regime, not NATO. (As the Post has repeatedly said in all its reports, Muhtorov is not charged with attempting to set up any terrorist acts on American soil.)

Should his determination to fight only Karimov and indifference about NATO matter in his defense? As I said, in terms of the law, I don't see how it could. In terms of a moral wrapping to the case, I also don't see that it should because any effort to use violence and support violence to change a government, even a hated one, is wrong -- and it's why the human rights movement has always taken pains to be non-violent in its approach.

While the lawyer is going to look narrowly at what will support his client's case, hyping the human rights activism will do a terrible disservice to the human rights movement as it will conflate it with extremism and terrorism. Foust doesn't care about that -- anything that discredits the human rights movement would fit well with his chronic assault on the movement.

And the defense may focus on Muhtorov's legitimate beefs with the regime (whether or not they are valid is impossible to find out) over his sister and the state's persecution of him first as a businessman, then as an activist disseminating Human Rights Watch pamphlets.

In an affidavit, the FBI says they tapped Muhtorov's phone calls and recorded him talking about final goodbyes to his family and about his allegiance to global jihad.

Phoning while Muslim? Interneting while Muslim? The FBI does not appear to think so.

Meanwhile, neither Muhtorov himself has said anything more than "not guilty" (probably on the advice of his lawyers) and the lawyer himself hasn't said anything more, either. Bakhtiyor Jumayev, who was charged with donating $300 to Muhtorov toward the IJU cause, was arrested but hasn't appeared in court yet.

Judging from a veritable flurry of smarmy Twittering, basically what these two very tight co-authors and girlfriends, associated with the notorious site Registan.net, have done is get their friends to hold a conference and invite their friends -- that's why I call it "networked academism" -- in a parody of their own paper's discussion of the dubious concept of "networked authoritarianism".

Oh, it's always done, and we see it everywhere -- academics in a certain school of thought or discipline or location develop networks of friends, and they all speak at each other's conferences and they all write blurbs for each other's books or cite each other. It's human nature, it's done everywhere, and we've all seen it in whatever field or endeavour we're in. As an old boss at Soros Foundations used to tell me, "I don't care if you pick your friends; just pick good friends!"

In the case of this conference, I suspect Dr. Paula Newberg, Director, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown, who is convening the meeting and speaking, just wanted to have a conference about a very hot and topical issue, and invited people she knew to speak and they suggested other people they knew, and that's how it goes. Far from sponsoring a thesis that concedes authoritarianism and implies we shouldn't fight it, she no doubt imagines she is sponsoring a discussion about how people overcome authoritarianism on the Internet. At her institute, they teach diplomats things like how to write blogs or discuss topics like "What is hype and reality in e-diplomacy?" so it's all good.

Another speaker, Dr. Séverine Arsène is the 2011-2012 Yahoo ! fellow in residence at Georgetown University; as Yahoo tells us, "Dr. Arsène’s project will explore how different notions of modernity across the globe are contextually based and how these varied representations shape the uses of social media, more specifically, as a tool for online protests."

I'll leave aside the Derrida and Foucault and Chomsky and Zizek on that bookshelf and simply note that I suspect this fellowship, part of Yahoo's Business and Human Rights Program, grew out of its considerable guilt trip for sending Chinese dissidents to the gulag. I don't know if the combination of Big IT corporate machinations around business and Big IT corporate guilt make for the best impetus and environment for serious academic study, but that question is just too big for my pay grade -- I suspect it's a question that if asked thoroughly, would take you to places that would undermine every single university in America. I'm not an academic.

The title of the conference is, "Having Your Say Online: The People's Voice in Authoritarian Contexts." I imagine my bristling at the uses of "The People" especially in a context where we're supposed to be talking about authoritarianism will date me to the Cold War, but I don't care -- there isn't any such thing as "the people," and even "civil society" and "the public" are institutions that can scarcely said to exist or are very fragile and fledgling in these societies anyway -- and that needs to be said. "The People" -- who are they, comrades? (Oh, and hey, I know at least one web site where the "People's Voice" is banned in the form of at least one people.)

Let's see: The conference is filled with zams -- Internews is sending a vice president; Katy Pearce is an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University; Zeynep Tufekci is Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Courtney Radsch is Program Manager, Global Freedom of Expression Campaign, Freedom House, etc.

So it isn't a big-name slate and it is probably is as good as it gets when you organize conferences with your friends (and Pearce has just arrived at Georgetown. No matter -- these are all people with lots of "mindshare" through Twitter followers and blogs and forums; and zams, after all, do the staff work and really influence things even unbeknownst to the top bosses.

The viewpoints all range from about A to A and a half -- the differences between Kendzior and Pearce, with their doom-and-gloom news about authoritarian Azerbaijan, and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with her over-enthusiasm about the power of networks in the Arab Spring and the revolutionary change of her own country, or Zeynep Tufekci, a booster of WikiLeaks (and celebrator of Twitter's news censorship-by-country program) are really negligible because they are all on the same managed-democracy circuit. They fawn over each other on blogs and Twitters excusing each other repeatedly for not really knowing each others' fields and therefore only willing to learn, blah blah. But they don't really differ about their central thesis: that the objective of social media is to put -- and keep -- a New Class of intellectual elites in power (including themselves!) who will decide what is effective or not effective in "global governance".

Our government, which has a much-discussed but not terribly well-funded (or speedily expended) Internet Freedom Program is supplying Katharine Kendrick, Foreign Affairs Officer, Internet Freedom, U.S. Department of State for the conference, and God help us, that may be as much grounded criticism of these extreme academics and activists as we'll be getting here.

CRITIQUE OF KENDZIOR/PEARCE PAPER 'NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM'

Kendzior and Pearce will discuss the theses of "Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan" in the latest issue of the Journal of Communication (I was finally able to get a copy). I've critiqued the summaries and discussions of it before as noted above, mainly here.

I've only been able to make one quick read through and I caution again that I'm not a social science academic. But I certainly have a right to critique it as much as anyone concerned about Internet freedom and how US public policy will be shaped on the Internet, so I will raise these concerns:

1. The paper is only 16 pages, of which 2 are taken up with footnotes and halves of others are taken up with charts -- it's slight. So slight as to be hardly construed as holding the weight of this awesome claim -- that reporting on abuses of authoritarian regimes using the boon of social media only retards the overall growth of social media (the hope for change) and therefore... we should stop that. Or something.

2. The paper is based on public opinion surveys made in 2009-2010 *before* the Arab Spring, which had a dramatic impact on the world, and this region, because of the many analogies (I reject Kendzior's thesis that discussing the Arab Spring's impact is "reverse orientalism" here.)

3. To be sure, the academics have studied social media content up to as late as 2011, but the surveys do not appear to be taken from that year. They also provide no indication of the social media they studied.

4. Although they make reference to the donkey bloggers' case as a premise upon which to hinge their arguments, and are studying the impact of the donkey bloggers' repression on Internet users during this period, the authors do not appear to have asked their informants in the survey about the "donkey bloggers" per se (at least, they don't say they do and don't make this explicit if they did).

Instead, in fact, they are using several questions that are part of a survey put on not directly by them, but by the Carnegie-funded Caucasus Research Resource Center as part of a larger survey that has been run annually since 2006. In it, they used a contrived "vignette" in which they mount two propositions and asked for five levels of agreement ranging from "disagree" to "neutral" to "very much agree."

As they write in the paper:

"Measuring support for protests was a significant challenge given Azerbaijanis' hesitance to criticize the government. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic as well as the political environment, this measure was presented as a vignette, a cameo description of a hypothetical situation ((King, Murray, Salomon, & Tandon, 2004; King & Wand, 2006) which allows for a specific interpretation of what the question is attempting to measure. Vignettes are less threatening because they are less personal (Hughes, 1998). The following three-step process was ultimately adopted as a result of pilot testing by the Caucasus Research Resource Center. First, respondents were given a privacy card in which they were asked to agree with one of two statements: (1) "People should participate in protest actions against the government, as this shows the government that the people are in charge" or (2) "People should not participate in protest actions against the government as it threatens stability in our country."

Obviously, these are accepted methods in the field, judging from their references, but the wording of the questions simply have to be challenged at the root: 1) the premise that "the people" can show the government that "they are in charge" is simply not one present in these societies. The people aren't in charge and haven't been in charge in centuries. They don't mount demonstrations with the presumption that they should be, or will be and 2) people can in fact perceive the authoritarian government as destablizing their own local situation with unfair actions such as shutting off electricity or forcing people to pick cotton, and may view protest as a means to restore stability.

More often than not, demonstrations in these countries are mounted on single issues like jobs or housing; in the recent case in Guba, it was about the governor's insult to people who opted to sell cheap land given to them by the government. The demonstrations are mounted on notions of justice -- often people expect that "the good tsar" who only has "bad advisors" will hear and see the victims' plight if only they can get past those "bad advisors" or "corrupt officials" and make a direct appeal. Justice has to do with making the system work as promised -- heavy punishment for miscreants, ridicule and banishment for corrupt officials -- not overturning the government or instituting alien concepts like separation of powers where some mythical "people" or civic entity will now take over and mount all kinds of supervisory organs over the all-powerful executive.

Thus, hearing any question put that way, many people would respond to the part of it that just doesn't tally with their experience or understanding and reject it -- the people aren't ever in charge and won't be. Stability is always advisable and that sounds like the right action. That could add significantly to the skewing of the outcome to a negative. And of course there's the tendency of Soviet audiences, well known from the University of Iowa studies done in the past, to pre-anticipate what the survey-taker wants and give it to him to be good subjects. The survey should factor that in with some kind of coefficient -- that doesn't seem to have been here and the problem is mentioned only in passing as a difficulty of the environment.

5. The concept of "networked authoritarianism" isn't an academic or scholarly concept, it's a journalistic slogan coined by a former CNN bureau chief in Hong Kong, Rebecca McKinnon, who has published a book about Internet freedom issues recently, but not a scholarly book.

(Oh, if it turns out "networked authoritarianism" really is a scholarly term accepted in the field, then shoot me as the networked authoritarian that you are, but I haven't heard this.)

My problem with McKinnon's use of this term -- and I've heard her speak on this and seen her numerous blog posts and articles on it -- is that it simply isn't true. Her premise is that the Soviet-type states are more sophisticated now, and use the Internet themselves now, and don't use crude methods of prior censorship or outright blockage -- instead they compete with a different narrative, or occasionally make object lessons of people in support of their authoritarianism.

Except, that's not how it is. In fact, these states don't even register certain newspapers, NGOs, parties, etc. which means at a very basic and crude level in the society there is outright censorship of the old-fashioned analog kind. In fact, they do block websites and jam mobile phones during demonstrations and engage in surreptious DDOS attacks on sites and all the rest of it in a very physical and very direct form of censorship. In fact the government is not open and the state media tightly controlled, in the most basic forms of censorship there have always been.

That they allow the Internet, the way they allow, oh, flush toilets and telephones and electricity, doesn't mean anything. It's just another layer. We never had a theory for "electricity authoritarianism" when Lenin declared that "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country". We never had "fax" or "email" authoritarianism. Why is social media special? Because it makes collectivism easier? But it was always easy.

Sure, these governments have sophisticated sock puppets and regime tools and an oprichina-like elite around themselves whose privileges depend on their cynical support of the regime and obnoxious harassment of dissidents. So what? They don't have to be networked to censor; or rather, they were always networked, as that's what collectivism, Soviet-style, is all about -- rigid networks suppressing individuals.

6. This brings me to my main complaint about the Kendzior/Pearce thesis -- that it is too harsh a predicter -- in its rigid descriptivism -- of the poor potential for, and inevitable failure of online dissent and democratization in these countries. Sure, the regime makes an object lesson of the donkey bloggers and the discussion of their persecution in fact leads people to reduce their usage (if in fact the survey really delivers that news -- I'm not so sure it does). But so what?

What Kendzior/Pearce don't have them is a theory -- or the rest of a theory -- to explain how the activism at home and abroad grew for the donkey bloggers, and the regime was eventually forced to release them. That reality -- that these imprisoned people were released! -- is something that just doesn't fit in their model so they don't analyze it. Instead, they prefer to describe how the internal and international protests failed throughout 2010, although finally the bloggers were released in 2011.

7. Imagine my surprise at discovering in this paper that Facebakers is referenced! Facebakers, renamed Socialbakers in December 2010, is a commercial agency that cooperates with Facebook and supplies information about how many people have joined Facebook and use it in a given country.

In fact, this was part of a drum-beat of harassment that they and Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm cooked up to try to silence my criticism of their theses on Registan after I was banned.

Pearce wrote that she couldn't accept my simple reporting of simple numbers until she could "see the methodology" and snarked that it was a commercial firm. Huh?! But she quoted it in her own paper here! The hypocrisy!

QUESTIONS TO ASK ON THE THEORY OF NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM

There's lots more to say about the paper and the troubling aspects of the theses, but let me cut to the kind of questions that I think need to be asked at this conference:

1. If the documenting and reporting of human rights violations in a country leads to less Internet usage because of fear of reprisals, are Kendzior and Pearce counseling people not to document human rights abuses and publish them online? Do they recommend that the State Department Internet Freedom Program not supply training or grants to those who maintain human rights web sites?

2. If documenting human rights abuse leads to a plunge in usage, or a plunge in political discussion, are Kendzior and Pearce recommending that democracy program directors and other foreign policy personnel steer their patrons toward more innocuous activity and safer content so that they can secure the increase of Internet penetration first and benign social networking activity first, and move to more critical stuff later?

Test case: all eyes will be on Azerbaijan with the coming EuroVision song contest. Should Internet users and bloggers use this as a chance to talk about the problems of human rights and social justice in their authoritarian, oil-rich state? Or should they stick to happy musical tweeting? (Guess what: no one will be able to stop them gabbing on social media and we'll hear a lot of hate of Armenians mixed with other interesting stuff.)

(This sort of cautious incrementalism of "what the traffic can bear," BTW, was the Internews recipe for TV broadcasting in 1990s and early 2000s, and frankly, it failed miserably as countries still shut down their clients in places like Azerbaijan anyway, even with their cautious programming, as the Internet VP might be prepared to admit.)

3. Whatever "chilling affect" the oppression of people like the donkey bloggers and other journalists killed or jailed in the last year may have had, in fact, the people of Guba show that both the Arab Spring model as well as the use of Youtube to get out their message worked dramatically to remove a disliked official and get people jailed for protest to be released. How does the "networked authoritarianism" model adapt to these kinds of phenomena, or in fact do they disprove the theory? In fact, after Guba, can we really talk about the concept of "networked authoritarianism" as really working so effectively?

4. Is there another model for Internet usage and societal change that might account for the actual fluctuations and moments of progress and regress? Can there be a pluralistic approach -- some people will try the hard stuff and get jailed; others will try the soft stuff and maybe live to cautiously discuss politics on a social forum; eventually those jailed may be released and those who were cautious may be radicalized for other reasons, or even out of a sense of solidarity?

5. Kendzior and Pearce challenge two statements by American leaders that sum up the hopes for the Internet in foreign policy, "Reagan's proclamation that the "Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microship" and "Secretary of State Clinton's bet than an open Internet will elad to stronger, more prosperous countries". But what's really wrong with these inspiring statements? They're true, broadly speaking. Faxes, Xerox machines, and CNN all had a lot to do with bringing the Soviet Union down after the failed coup, and arguably samizdat, that helped galvanize and link earlier movements of dissent, helped lay the groundwork for the following electronic age.

6. If we're to be cyber-skeptics about the efficacy of social media for changing regimes, and don't credit machinery with automatic effects on societies, why aren't we as skeptical of about the effectiveness of social media in the hands of those regimes? If it's powerless, it's powerless because not only machines effect or change human behaviour.

And a question to Tufecki:

7. You've applauded Twitter's decision to censor tweets at the request of even authoritarian governments, and even declared it a helpful decision for activists, on the theory that this will provide "transparency" about the bad actions of authoritarianism and help gain support for democracy causes. You cited the need to "follow the law".

But can you concede that "the law" in countries like Russia and China, as the Russian saying goes, is a bridle that can be turned hither and thither -- that these laws are not *just* laws that liberal democratic societies would declare as right. Why concede such lawlessness and legal nihilism?

As for the deterrent effect of the "transparency," several things could go wrong with that notion -- the system could be flooded and become so much noise that it can't be coherently analyzed; and authoritarians may not wait to request censorship by tweet, but will introduce their own software or regimes to either completely cut off Twitter, or block the view of certain accounts without even interacting with Twitter's central management. We are told this already happens with Facebook, where in countries like Uzbekistan, separate pages are said to be blocked (we've even heard of separate words or entries by certain people being blocked on Medvedev's Facebook page in Russia). It would be interesting to get a technical readout on whether/how that is happening. In other words, it's quite possible that before any magnificent "censor-by-tweet" and "censor-by-country" regime comes into effect, these networked authoritarians will pre-empt with their own filtration technology.

I realize that the questions I've outlined here are not likely to be asked, and the topics aren't even included in the agenda.

In fact, the sessions are about "identity" and "inequalities" -- two standard-issue "critical Marxist" sort of academic topics which regrettably provide endless opportunity for waxing at length about "identity as a construct" and "the inherent violence of the patriarchal society" and all the rest.

No doubt there will be a discussion of the "nym wars" if Jillian York is present, a topic where I've disagreed with her strenuously because the same anonymity that she wants to award as a special dispensation to her revolutionary friends in the Middle East can be/is used to harass and heckle and bully people on line with differing views from behind secret identities, and used of course by Anonymous to hack and avoid accountability. I don't believe all platforms should be forced to add the nym feature; it should be a voluntary policy and feature that they supply if they wish to take the customer service headaches that go with it.

As I've noted before, the nym wars, driven by hordes of revolutionaries, "progressives, " Anonymous e-thugs, hackers, etc. should be a separate topic from this: asking American companies not to turn over the private data of customers in any form to abusive authoritarian foreign governments or to our own government without a lawful court order.

Finally, on a personal but definitely relevant political note, I'll say that any decent academic concerned about free speech and free intellectual inquiry both in academic and the wider culture of social media discussion must be actively alarmed at the manner in which Kendzior and Pearce (particularly Kendzior) tried to silence my critique of their academic work by making the most outrageous claims and spears. These two not only kept lobbing up @ tweets addressed to the front page of EurasiaNet where I previously worked, they went to the editor to complain about me and urge my removal. Incredibly, their machinations had an effect and an effort was made to put a total Twitter/social media gag on me to forbid me to discuss the region at all or debate anyone at all.

Naturally, I rejected that effort and when my contract expired, I indicated that I found the notion of a Twitter gag unacceptable for freelancers, especially in the absence of any contractual specification or any written policy.

I stand by everything I've written on Twitter -- there is nothing obscene or extreme there, no action that would constitute "bullying" or "stalking" -- the fake notions purveyed by these two net nannies -- that would warrant calling the police -- which is what Kendzior threatened to do to me (!) over my blog.

03/22/2012

Donkey parody video which led to sentencing of Azeri bloggers to jail.

The troubling article by Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce published in the Journal of Communication is now published here behind a paywall, where it will cost you $35 to access the article for 24 hours. Just like those old heady days of reading samizdat overnight -- except for that $35 part! Needless to say, I can't spend a day's grocery bill on these newly-baked "networked authoritarianism" gurus, so I will see if I can either get it in the NY public library or perhaps someone will have a copy in their office. Funny, both of them complain about paid academic content and boost open source stuff on Twitter, but their own article will cost you.

I wrote about my concerns related to their articlehere and here -- prompting both Kendzior and Pearce not only to react with thin-skinned fury but to start attacking me for "poor analytical skills" etc. myself. Academia is a terribly closed society and they are exemplary of some of the worst aspects of it -- stifling criticism, suppressing critics (Sarah assists Nathan Hamm in moderating at Registan, and is responsible for my banning from that site for criticizing the notorious Joshua Foust).

Like Evgeny Morozov, Kendzior and Pearce are anti-utopianist regarding the Internet and take almost glee in informing you just how bad authoritiaran states suppress it and how foolhardy dissenters are to resist this. And like Morozov, they discount anything but their own grim message and essentially counsel scholars -- and by implication policy-makers -- to accept this status-quo and not attempt to change it or look for alternative narratives. In reacting to hypotheses -- and documented evidence -- in the Middle East and Russia that purport to show that increased social network participation is leading to increased political activism (and that this starts with exposing the regimes' crimes), Kendzior says:

The “failures” – the many countries where the circulation of evidence of state crimes through social media prompts no change in state practices, and in some cases, dissuades citizens from joining activist causes – tend to go unmentioned. They are, I suspect, more the norm than the exception, and they have proven the rule in former Soviet authoritarian states.

The ellusive and changing and contradictory creature known as "the Internet" may not lend itself to firm pronouncements taken only in time-slices (the paper deals with the period 2009-2011) and things may be getting better or old conceptions being unravelled, but that's not the affair of anthropologists -- they need things to stay put.

In many places in the world, including in this region of Central Asia, documenting abuses by the regime leads to change. It may not be massive as in Tahrir Square or even in Bolotnaya Square, but it is something. Not so for Central Asia and the Caucasus, as Kendzior writes:

"In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest."

I reject this thesis myself, and it's fairly easy to do so as more and more episodes pile up. As I noted, when protesters uploaded a video of an abusive governor in a province in Azerbaijan he was ultimately fired; protestors who had been arrested were freed; and increased scrutiny was given to the problems of injustice. Shh, don't tell Kendzior and Pearce! The story completely falls outside of their paradigm; indeed, it didn't fit in the framework of this EurasiaNet, author, either, but eventually the pressure of events caused him to revise his telling of the story.

It's not necessarily an indicator of anything big, given that Facebook is relatively new and there are other local social networking sites with more relevance, perhaps, but there are now 782,000 on Facebook in Azerbaijan, and their numbers have increased significantly as we can see from Socialbakers. By the way, Uzbekistan's numbers on Socialbakers, which Katy Pearce fiercely contested and demanded to know about the methodology -- as if this respected commercial agency cooperating with Facebook to report on its growth couldn't be trusted! -- are now rising substantially again -- to 128,680. That defies Kendzior's complaint that the growth rate was slowing so much last year that the numbers couldn't really be said to be evidence of a "surge". Look at the graph again. In all the countries of Eurasia except Turkmenistan they appear to be taking quite a jump. Sometimes the facts of real life get in the way of your academic thesis.

When I first heard about Azerbaijan's "donkey bloggers," I couldn't help think of an opposition politician I had met on a reporting trip in the town of Lankoran, close to the border with Iran. The head of the local Musavat Party, Yadigar Sadigov, a genial and intellectual man, seemed to be the personification of the marginalized opposition in the former Soviet Union. His office was small, dark, with a few academic tomes, and posters curling up on the wall. He seemed resigned to the fate of being in a state of perpetual and nominal opposition. You didn't get the impression that this was an organization that was going to take down the Aliyev regime.

The donkey bloggers, on the other hand, were young, web-savvy, and English-speaking. The poster boys of Internet activism, Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli were jailed for 2 1/2 years for making a video mocking the government, which involved a man dressed up as a donkey. They were representative of a new generation, unburdened by the fractious politics of the traditional opposition or of the constrictive paradigms of Soviet-era dissidents. What tied their generation together were not political parties or ideology but rather social networks and the Internet.

Sigh. I shouldn't have to spend too much time explaining why Soviet-era dissidents were in "constrictive paradigms" -- but it might have to do with facing 7 years of labor camp and 5 years of exile merely for writing critical samizdat. I suppose it's fashionable to think of anti-communist Soviet dissidents as hopelessly mired in Cold War categories, but Sakharov's "Thoughts on Progress" and Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to Leaders" still make very interesting and relevant reading -- and there's the added creepy part where Putin embraced some of "Leaders" and visited Solzhenitsyn.

The age-old debates about whether capitalism or communism is better, or whether they even work, didn't go away, as unfashionable as the progs find it in the US -- it's still the essential argument of the Internet, collectivism and "sharing" and copyleftism and memes, or the individual and freedom of expression and privacy.

So to suggest that the opposition figures in places like Azerbaijan are marginal, doomed, out of touch, fractious -- gosh, that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they are too often persecuted and sent to jail, would it!

03/21/2012

Day two of the session of review by the UN Human Rights Committee of Turkmenistan's compliance with the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights wasn't any improvement over the poor performance of the first day.

I was tied up with other commitments but I caught up with the Turkmen emigres who went to audit the session, and got their reports.

On the first day, Yazdursun Gurbannazarova, head of the Presidential Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, told us that there was wonderful cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) -- seminars, conferences, talks -- improvement of legislation!

But did they visit the prisons, we wondered?

Some of the Committee's experts asked about this, and finally First Deputy Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan Vepa Hadjiyev had some answers.

He said that indeed, the ICRC had "visited a prison" -- well, sort of.

It turns out it was an "LTP" -- the Russian acronym from a Soviet-era institution for -- literally -- "curative work prophylaxis" -- or work therapy for alcoholics and drug addicts.

I've visited some of these institutions in Russia -- they are pretty raunchy places with drunks dragged in and strapped into chairs to rant and rave their heads off until they pass out, covered in their own vomit. Frankly, I've observed the exact same thing in Bellevue Hospital's "non-elopement" adult psychiatric ward where especially violent alcoholics are brought in -- sometimes rolled up in big pieces of canvas to restrain them or strapped to cots. The difference really comes with the training of the police and the procedures and the tendency to handle drunks less punitively in the US and more as a medical problem than in a place like Turkmenistan.

To be sure, in Turkmenistan, there is a medical aspect to this facility, but the "work therapy" concept and the fact that any one who is a vagrant or just marring the beautiful marble landscapes of the city can find themselves dumped into one of these places.

Not fun, but even so, they aren't like the prisons, and especially not like the remote, secret prisons where political prisoners are held. People aren't held in them for as long, and they don't have the same punitive regimes of rationing of food or solitary confinement. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the LTP in Turkmenistan, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say it isn't that different from every other post-Soviet LTP.

So there are two such facilities outside Ashgabat in Ahal, I'm told, one for foreigners (that would mean "Iranians" or "Turks" I suppose) and one for locals. Likely the ICRC was taken to the "nicer" one for foreigners that maybe had a more recent paint job or furious tree-planting -- but the Turkmen delegation declined to say.

I suppose if the Turkmens have to start with something shy of an actual prison, the LTP is a good start -- except, they're not serious, I don't think. I think this is a dodge and a distraction, and busy-work to show off to the bosses. No doubt Turkmenistan's LTPs aren't a day at the beach, but they are nothing like Ovan-Depe or Seydi prison in the desert -- awful places where people languish for years, about which the Turkmen Lawyers' Association has reported.

There was another troubling aspect to what was reportedly said by the Turkmen officials, and that was that the ICRC was helping them with advice on how they should build a new women's prison colony so that it would be consistent with "international norms."

Now this is a hustle that the ICRC really shouldn't get involved with. It really reeks of manipulation, because there is really no such thing as context-free application of "international norms" here in a place like Turkmenistan.

The ICRC aren't architects and building specialists, although they may have ideas about what might make for a "humane" facility -- basics like windows that don't have muzzles on them (like all the post-Soviet prisons do) so that fresh air isn't so hard to get; beds spread apart at a greater regulation distance that helps reduce the incidence of tuberculosis; and so on. But you could have a lovely women's colony with lacy curtains on the windows and down pillows on the bed -- but all the wrong people could be put in them -- because there is no due process of civil rights. It really strikes me that ICRC shouldn't be in the business of helping a repressive country like Turkmenistan to design their prisons in any fashion -- and yet if true, I can see how this might have happened -- it's about getting your foot in the door.

The unfortunate aspect of all this is that the ICRC does their work in strict confidence with the state party in order to gain access and so they are not at all likely to comment on this. So we'll remain in the dark until either the Turkmen government says something, and that will be a deliberate distortion, or some relative or rare human rights activist gets some information and reports it. In other words -- we'll remain in the dark.

One interesting piece of good news I learned from the emigres -- which the Turkmen delegation announced at the UN on March 16th -- is that Ovezgeldy Atayev, the hapless head of parliament, unceremoniously removed from his post and arrested when Berdymukhamedov came barging into power and found him procedurally in the way of his takeover (or his siloviki group's takeover) has now been released from prison (and evidently with his spouse, who was also jailed along with him). However, he's likely essentially under house arrest, like other such freed persons. Apparently, this was a gesture toward the HRC session.

One of the members apparently tried manfully to apply one of those methods UN officials often apply on such authoritarian state parties, which goes like this, "Let's pretend you're normal, and ask you normal questions and expect a normal answer."

So it went like this: "Did you work with any NGOs in the preparation of this report?" The answer was "no," so the member had at it again. "But are you in touch with NGOs and do you get their reports?"

Answer: "I have all their addresses and phone numbers on my Super-ipad," said the Turkmen official. This earned some smiles from the Turkmens in the audience who found it touchingly provincial that the ipad was referred to as "Super" -- like a lot of Western gadgets that people don't always know quite how to work. Not to mention the "touching" aspect of this official essentially compiling intelligence on all these people -- even as he never really consulted with them. And now he has pictures to go with his dossiers, as officials demonstratively photographed the emigres during the session.

So, the UN basically said "mind the gap," and we'll have to wait another five years or more to have a chance to revisit these particular issues with Turkmenistan.

One marvels -- again -- at that persistent game of behaving "as if" things were normal. Says the UN press release: "one expert wanting to know if today’s meeting with the Committee was being broadcast to Turkmens “as we speak”." Instead of just saying, "No, the president controls every second of TV and radio broadcasting and we confiscate cell phones from people trying to independently report events," this is what the Turkmens had to say:

Regarding public access to today’s meeting, Vepa Hadjiyev, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, said: “We would be delighted to provide open access and information.” Turkmenistan had “a great deal of means” for providing information to its people on what was happening in the international community. Comments were made on various websites and information was readily provided through Turkmenistan’s media and resource centres.

All of that is balderdash of course, and the real way this information will reach at least some people in Turkmenistan is through the work of Chronicles of Turkmenistan, which posted a report of the session which will get picked up by RFE/RL and other broadcasters and heard or seen by some people inside the country.

Sadly, not even the official press releases from the UN Press Center will be seen -- much less the emigre reports -- at the UN's website in Turkmenistan, which never, ever covers the human rights tready body sessions -- and really should be pressured to do so.

03/20/2012

A tragedy was caused by the controversial Afrosiyob high-speed train in Uzbekistan.

According to a report from Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Aziza Fahriddinova, age 7, was killed when the wind from the fast train swept her against a post, fergananews.com reported.

Authorities were supposed to put barbed-wire fences around the tracks but never got around to it. It's "Stand by Me" come to real life.

The tragedy occurred on the line from Ok Oltin-Gulestan. The Samarkand transportation inspector is conducting an investigation.

Does this have anything to do with the Northern Distribution Network? No. Except it shows incompetence on the rails, and indifference to human safety.

EurasiaNet has reported on The Little Train That Couldn't -- the Afrosiyob -- in the past, implying that it was related to the NDN: "You might call it the train in vain. And it has troubling implications for a US plan to stoke East-West trade via a New Silk Road, as well as keep American and NATO troops well supplied in Afghanistan."

Well, everything is related to the elephants of the NDN in EurasiaNet's book, but this is a civilian train not carrying the military freight -- it's only related to the whole "New Silk Road" concept of using this same passageway for military cargo for boosting the economy in general.

EurasiaNet said the Afrosiyob, made in Spain, after starting up last October, stopped operations November 17 for unknown reasons although hinted that it either caught fire or derailed.

But it must not have been down for long because it began running again, evidently in January 2012, leading to this little girl's death.

I've been looking around for any information about Sharipov and can't find much (it's a common name and the social media accounts with that name don't look to be related to him).

Frontline Defenders has an affidavit for a 1599 complaint from some victims of human rights violations who wrote extensively of their experiences here.

And here's what's said about Lt. Col. Sharipov in one account:

The hearing took place on 2nd April [2004] and it was also obvious that the head of the 3rd department for the fight against corruption and terror, lieutenant colonel Zoir Sharipov and a staff member of this department mayor [major?] Bakhtier Mukhtarov both said that they found six books in Arab script in the hen-house and in the response of an expert three books were pointed out in Cyrillic and the title "Al-vai" of a forbidden religious book. So they themselves sent three booksi n Cyrillic to an expert so they could consider me a member of Khizburt-takhrir [Hizb-ut-Tahir].

The judge told us that the videotape had been sealed after the recording in the hen-house and that it was being opened then. So then how did it happen that on the video there was a recording of a personal meeting that had taken place when I was in custody?

On the video we saw that one of the investigators had not even counted to three books when another investigator who was making up a report in the corridor, shouted that there were 6 (six) items. Even the judge laughed when he saw this part and asked for it to be repeated several times. This is a clear indicator of falsification.

Yes, I'm wondering if Bakhtier Mukhtarev is a relative of Jamshid's (his name is spelled Muhtorov in the English press but also appeared in Russian and English as Mukhtarev), and if that also explains anything about his story.

Remember how Tolib Yakubov said Jamshid's sister had a job as a secretary in the court house? Knowing how the patronage system works, could this have been a job that a relative inside the system helped her get? Speculation of course. Or even aside from all that, was Muhtorov pressed into cooperation in exchange for getting let off?

Police plant religious tracts, drugs, and weapons on people all the time in Uzbekistan -- imagine going to the lengths to hide them in the hen-house!

The entire document gives a very good sense of what the level of persecution was like in Jizzakh -- high and extensive. And it squarely describes Sharipov as somebody who methodically harassed dissidents from his position in the anti-terrorist department.

So as I've indicated, the question is whether Sharipov is involved at all in Muhtorov's case now, and what the variations are;

o He was in collusion with Muhtorov and they are acting on behalf of the Uzbek secret police to fake a terrorist plot;

o He is serving as a false witness against Muhtorov without his knowledge, and continuing possible persecution of him.

o He is making an accurate report in fact of planned support of a terrorist group -- or some other variation.

Sarah, I appreciate the field experience and professional experience you bring to this story. But I wonder if there is ever a grounds of suspicion and "probable cause" that you'd ever accept in a terrorist case as warranting arrest, if you can't accept an arrest is justified for Muhtorov.

Muhtorov was arrested at the airport with money, cell phones, and GPS equipment on his way to Turkey and charged with "material support of a terrorist group" for his plans -- discovered by FBI bugging of his phone -- to connect with the Islamic Jihad Union which is on the US terrorist list. He indeed made these contacts repeatedly, it's not like he just surfed a jihad site. He also is alleged to have collected money from another person to support this group from another Uzbek emigre who was also arrested. He vowed to support this group unto death. He had jihad videos on his cell phone with the 9/11 towers. He told his daughter when he left that he wouldn't see her again until "heaven". Maybe any one piece of evidence is circumstantial, but taken together, along with testimony the FBI still keeps secret, does appear to warrant an arrest.

I'm struck by a key discrepancy in the story you got when you interviewed him of the forms of persecution he suffered. I don't doubt at all that these forms of persecution exist, having covered Uzbekistan for years; I also think it's quite plausible Muhtorov suffered this form of harassment for activism. But the story does differ.

""In January of 2006, I was arrested on rape charges and beaten by the arresting officers who made it clear that my beating was a result of my activism."

On Fergananews.com which interviewed him at the same time, he describes a different, longer and more complicated story about being set up by a woman who was working for the secret police and trying to entrap him, whom he then turns and whose statement he then tapes, then he is attacked later on the street:

"Two days later, on December 21, I was attacked. I was walking home at 10 p.m. or so when several men jumped out of a car and knocked me down. It happened so fast that I did not even see how many assailants there were, much less see enough to identify them afterwards. A blow at the head with something hard put me out. Some kindhearted pedestrians found me in the morning and helped me get to my place. Once I came to, I discovered that the attackers had got away with my Dictaphone and a folder with documents in it. They had not been interested in money."

In the first version of the story from your interview, he is arrested by police, and beaten by arresting officers after arrest. In the second version in another interview, he is first threatened with a trumped-up case through this woman, then attacked by unknown people (implied to be secret police).

These are quite different stories. What's your sense of why there are these discrepancies in the story?

***

Some people might view the differences in these stories as insignificant. I don't. There's a big difference between formal processes and charges by official police in custody, and informal threats and beatings on the street by plainclothes secret police.

In one story, he is arrested by identifiable police whom he even calls "arresting officers", is charged with the crime of rape, and taken to a police station (or so it is implied by speaking of "arresting officers") and then beaten by those identifiable police. That's Sarah Stuteville's version. Even granted that she may have had to compress the story at the time to boil it down as it was complicated and space was limited, the difference between arrest on a criminal charge and beating by police and the other story is significant.

In the story he gives to Fergananews.com, he says that a woman kept bothering him and trying to set him up; that eventually she confessed that she had been sent to set him up (typical secret police story meme, as I poined out here on the "suicide" student hoax). He then turns her (another classic meme) and then the next thing that happens, he is attacked by unknown people (presumably secret police).

It's also possible that he himself gave a compressed version of his complicated story to a Western journalist, thinking it was too hard to convey otherwise. But is that really the case? Being arrested by police and charged with a fake charge (and then being let go for reasons we can't understand) is one thing; uncovering an attempt to set you up and then getting a beating and also escaping from many hours later "the next morning" is a very different story.

There are two other discrepancies that I didn't get into in my comment on the Globalist, but they are important to examine.

In the version of the story for Fergananews.com, Muhtorov is described as saying this:

Mukhtarov himself barely avoided arrest on fabricated charges of being an Islamic fundamentalist in August 2005. He avoided detention only because Birlik leader Vasila Inoyatova phoned the then Interior Minister Zakir Almatov on his behalf. Mukhtarov's activeness in the human rights movement rekindled his conflict with law enforcement agencies.

That doesn't come up in the version of the story told by Stuteville, but where there is a similar story about intervention by a woman and a tip-off from information from the Interior Ministry:

"One morning, soon after that, I was sitting having my breakfast when someone knocked on my door and warned me that the Minister of International Affairs had ordered that I be taken under arrest. At first I thought this was just another form of intimidation, but when I asked a close friend who also worked on human rights, she said that the government was coming for all of us and that we had to flee the country.

These could be two separate incidents, but we have to wonder how it is that this person who is irritating the authorities by circulating Human Rights Watch reports is constantly let go and never charged, at a time when others were -- and even given a tip-off to help him escape the country.

Some more problems with the CLP piece --

o they characterize Muhtorov affiliation incorrectly in their introduction:

Here, in his own words, devoted human rights activist Jamshid Mukhtarov, director of the Ezgulik Human Rights Society in the southern Uzbek city of Djizzak, discusses his decision to flee his country.

But by July 2006 in Kyrgyzstan, when they were interviewing him after he had fled Uzbekistan, he was no longer the director of a chapter in Jizzak or a member of Ezgulik. He was fired from the organization by then. He was already affiliated with the farmer's group which was more radical, which he describes in the Fergananews.com interview.

o they and Muhtorov both gloss over the violence involved by Andijan businessmen that preceded the massacre of civilians. First, Andijan businessmen were arrested on charges of corruption that were said to be trumped-up. Incensed at this arrest, a group of them took up arms and did a jail break of their friends -- killing a policeman in the process. They then took other policemen as human shields and went out into the public square. That part cannot be glossed over, but of course not only Uzbeks but Western liberals often do gloss over that part.

Then later, hundreds of people came out on the square to protest. The Uzbek authorities claim that the jail-breakers with the hostages were the problem, and that in attempting to shoot them down, civilians were shot, too. The story is more complex, and there is deliberate gunning down of women and children merely convening a protest in the square as well. There's no question that the Uzbek government is at fault for the Andijan massacre and killed innocent people. They're at fault for the original injustices that sparked the riot. But in fact people did use violence, did murder a policeman, and did take hostages as human shields.

My diagnosis about the discrepances in Muhtorov's stories? They don't add up. There are too many narrow misses and too many tip-offs from the authorities and too complicated a set-up story to pass muster.

While people can tell their own story differently at different times and it need not show guilt, the presence in these stories of a secret police operative that Muhtorov miraculously turns, or Interior Ministry officials willing to leak information about impending arrest, tend to point to a story of cooptation rather than mere repression.